Shoplifting has become a major problem in a number of places. It’s not just the odd item being snatched off the shelf, either, but sometimes thousands of dollars of merchandise.

This has caused many stores to simply keep their shelf empty–oddly enough, going back to the days when the staff picked your order and handed it to you–and others to shut down completely.

It’s not a great thing, by any stretch of the imagination.

But it seems this holiday season, we’ve been given a gift. That gift is the dumbest choice a shoplifter could have made.

A woman who tried to shoplift $727.86 in merchandise from a Michigan Walmart over the weekend didn’t get very far — namely because 75 police officers were in the store for a “Shop with a Cop” charity event.

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Police said Shop with a Cop gives area children, through donations from local businesses, an opportunity to partner with police officers and shop for themselves and family.

“We bring children that might otherwise not have a good Christmas get to come to the store,” Lt. Rene Gonzalez of the Michigan State Police told WJBK-TV. “They get $100, sometimes a $150 gift card to go and shop for themselves or family.”

Amid all the good cheer — not to mention a high concentration of law enforcement personnel — one woman got the bright idea to try a bit of shoplifting.

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She ignored a clerk who asked for her receipt, made her way to her car, and then began putting items inside her vehicle, WJBK reported.

Police said the trooper Walmart notified had another officer look after the child he was with and then caught up to the suspect in the parking lot. Police said the suspect, strangely enough, had parked her car next to a gaggle of police patrol vehicles there for the Shop with a Cop event.

The question I have to ask is whether this woman was being brave or stupid.

Yes, I know there’s often a thin line between the two, but this is something else. A mess of police cars outside, a number of police officers inside, and she figured she could just walk out with groceries, clothes, and a number of other items and no one would blink?

She walked through the self-checkout, too, which doesn’t really surprise anyone.

Now, this isn’t the most egregious attempt at shoplifting we’ve seen over the last couple of years, to be sure. Some people really don’t care. They’re generally in places where the DA has said he wouldn’t prosecute shoplifting to some degree or another.

That’s not the case in most of Michigan, though, and so this woman apparently just thought she could get away with it. I guess she figured the cops wouldn’t do anything to her, that they wouldn’t even notice her or something.

Which, when you think about it, is how most criminals operate. They really don’t think they’ll get caught, so long sentences and such aren’t really going to dissuade them in the least.

At least, it didn’t with this one.